Mass. Voters May Get Choice On Bilingual Ed.

Massachusetts lawmakers hope that a plan they approved last week to
modify current bilingual education laws will persuade voters to defeat
the anti-bilingual-education initiative on the November state
ballot.

Acting Gov. Jane M. Swift, a Republican, is expected to sign the
bill that outlines the changes.

"Hopefully, we're going to make the case that this is the answer,"
Rep. Peter J. Larkin, a Democrat, said of the bilingual education bill,
which he sponsored in the House. "We're offering a choice bill with
accountability."

Though the bill passed overwhelmingly last month in the House and
Senate, Ms. Swift sent it back to lawmakers on July 31—the last
day of their session. She asked them to cut a section that required
school districts with 50 or more students with limited English skills
who shared the same native language to provide at least two kinds of
full-time programs for them. "Let the schools decide whether or not to
provide two different programs," said Sarah Magazine, a spokeswoman for
the acting governor, in explaining Ms. Swift's position.

Ms. Magazine said that lawmakers seemed to incorporate Ms. Swift's
request in the final bill that they approved 15 minutes before their
session closed at midnight July 31, but that the governor still needed
to analyze the bill before signing it.

Massachusetts legislators have not passed a measure to change
bilingual education since 1971, when they mandated school districts
provide transitional bilingual education if they had 20 or more
students of the same language group. It was the first such state law in
the nation.

The new legislation would drop that requirement, though it would
permit districts to keep bilingual education as an option. It would
also require districts to annually test the progress that
English-language learners make in English.

Even if Ms. Swift signs the legislation, voters could replace it by
approving the ballot initiative.

At issue are bilingual education classes, in which students receive
instruction in their native languages while learning English. The
method has been largely curtailed in California and Arizona, where
voters approved anti-bilingual-education ballot initiatives similar to
the one in Massachusetts. Ron K. Unz, a California businessman,
financed the campaigns in California and Arizona. He is paying for the
effort in Massachusetts to do the same.

Real Change?

Mr. Larkin said the new bill would move educators away from the
debate over whether bilingual education or English immersion is the
best method for teaching English to immigrant children.

"At the end of the day, they're going to have to demonstrate English
proficiency and academic success," he said.

But Lincoln Tamayo, a former principal of Chelsea High School in
Chelsea, Mass., and the co-chairman of the effort to get the
anti-bilingual-education measure passed in the state, said the bill
would do "nothing at all" to improve programs for Massachusetts' 46,000
English-language learners.

"This is typical of politicians to give people a choice and call it
reform," he said. Real improvement, he argued, will come only when
schools get rid of bilingual education.

Mr. Tamayo said that any choice provided by the new legislation
would likely be overridden by lobbying from local Hispanic activists
and bilingual educators.

Charles Glick, a consultant to the Committee for Fairness to
Children and Teachers, a group fighting the ballot measure, countered
that the largest group trying to keep bilingual education in schools is
parents.

He said his group is pleased with the legislation that awaits Ms.
Swift's pen: "It has accountability standards, time limits, and allows
choice and local flexibility."

Also under the new legislation, school districts with only a few
English-language learners would be required to provide only part-time
English-as-a-second-language programs. If districts have 20 or more
English-language learners of the same native-language group, they would
need a full-time program.

Most of the programs authorized by the legislation—including
"structured English immersion"—build in at least some use of a
child's native language. The legislation prohibits school districts
from keeping students in bilingual education classes for more than
three years.

The state ballot initiative, on the other hand, would replace all
bilingual education programs in Massachusetts with "structured English
immersion" programs "not normally intended to exceed one year."

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